Anti-Semitism: vandals deface Polish cemetery with swastikas, anti-Jewish slogans

[Behind the Aegis]

Source: The Global Post

With anti-Semitic acts at the center of public attention in France, The Associated Press reports today that a Jewish cemetery in Poland was defaced in the night of Sunday to Monday by vandals who painted swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans on graves.

Citing the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, the news agency said the vandals had written “This is Poland, not Israel” at the cemetery in the eastern town of Wysokie Mazowiecki.

According to Wikipedia, the Holocaust took the lives of three million Polish Jews, “destroying an entire civiliazation.” Of a pre-war population of about 3.5 million, as few as 1.5 percent, or only 50,000 to 120,000 people, survived, the Internet encyclopedia says.

In a statement, the Foundation said “[w] e are shocked by the fact that the attack was directed against the resting place of the deceased citizens of Wysokie, neither not able to defend themselves, nor to be defended by their successors, brutally murdered during the World War II.”


Read more: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/poland/120319/anti-semitism-vandals-deface-polish-cemetery-swastikas-an

[Ken Burch]

1. Shameful. May the perpetrators be caught.

All decent human beings condemn this.

[davidhaslanded]

2. Hopefully

Hopefully the vandals will be found.

[COLGATE4]

3. Anti semitism always ran deep in

Poland. It was no accident that the Nazis located all of their death camps there. And it's no surprise that it's now raising its ugly head there again. Some things never change.

[nanabugg]

4. And here and all over the world. But not only anti-Semitism, it's also anti-ethnic (AA, Hispanic).

But few seem to care about the oppression and actual killing of people of color.

[COLGATE4]

7. Unfortunately, few seem to care about

the oppression and actual killing of any people. A sad commentary on our times. But I think there is a tendency to believe that antisemitism is by and large dead and gone, left in the ashes of WWII. Unfortunately there are strong pockets of it in today's Europe, and countries like Poland which have a rich history of it are fertile grounds for its resurgence.

[RZM]

5. What's of course odd

Is that the Germans killed a similar number of gentile Poles in the war as well. The Polish far-right (Endeks) were virulently anti-Semitic but also strongly anti-German before, during, and after the war. They even cooperated with the Communist government in the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Polish territory (mostly territory that had been German before the war).

The violence against gentile Poles was extensive and random. Some historians have even posited that had the Germans won the war, it's plausible that the Germans would have exterminated/expelled most of the Polish Catholic population and reduced the rest to slavery (that was the German plan for the occupied USSR, BTW).

Why any of them would endorse the swastika is beyond me.

[COLGATE4]

6. You're completely correct. Under Nazi racial

ideology all Slavs, including Poles were considered to be subhuman and only fit for menial/slave labor. That would have indeed been the fate of the Poles had Hitler prevailed.

[LeftishBrit]

8. Depressing

Poland is one of the most, if not the most, antisemitic countries in Europe.

[aquart]

10. I'm sorry, but the competition is really stiff on that one.

[aquart]

9. Ah, Easter time in Poland.

My grandmother remembered it well.

[Behind the Aegis]

11. Anti-Semitism On The Rise In Europe, According To Anti-Defamation League Report

By Lauren Markoe
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) Days after a lone gunman murdered a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, a new study reports widespread anti-Semitism in France and across Europe.

The survey, completed in January and released Tuesday by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, finds that 24 percent of the French population holds anti-Semitic views, up from 20 percent in 2009.

When asked if violence against Jews is rooted in anti-Jewish or anti-Israel sentiment, four in 10 Europeans (39 percent) responded that it was the result of anti-Jewish sentiment.

In France, 45 percent of those asked held this view, up from 39 percent in the previous survey.

more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/anti-semitism-rise-europe_n_1371313.html